Part 5: The Red Samurai,The Masked Shielder, The Man In The Black Poncho, and the Chase For The Guild Flag

December 28th, 2026. Fifty-two days since Sword Art Online began. Four days until New Year's.

If anyone asked Koharu if she'd survive this long at the beginning without Jaymes, she'd honestly answer no if she tried exploring the world. If she were to survive any other way, it would be by holding up in the Town of Beginnings. She had no hope of seeing the New Year, never mind the ending of the game, but her friends had changed that. She may not be as brave as they are, but she's far from the weeping coward on November 6th.

Right now, she spends the second evening on the fifth floor with Mito, Asuna, Jaymes, and Kirito in a moss-covered ruin. The area looks to be what could have been a square in its heyday. The five sit around a campfire Mito and Kirito had put together. Kirito even had an iron kettle to boil water and branches for the fire. When Asuna pointed out how Kirito had the branches, he and Mito explained how branches, specifically those in his possession called Fossilwood, can burn different colors and longer than a typical branch. They've passively collected a bunch on the third and fourth floor, but neither Jaymes nor Kirito said anything because they truly believed Asuna and Koharu would be against touching sticks found in damp soil with bugs attached to them.

Asuna was visibly grossed out, but Koharu wasn't too bothered. Bugs bother her, but her mind is on her partner, who stands a couple of feet away from the group, leaning against an eroded wall, his eyes closed and ears up. He's been this way more or less since they stopped at the square. She knows why; he's been apprehensive the entire time the group has quested within the ruins. Then again, he warned her about the great danger the fifth floor presented yesterday afternoon.

Mito, Koharu, and Jaymes did not scale the winding staircase between the fourth floor's boss lair and the entrance to the fifth; instead, they returned to Rovia and waited until Kirito and Asuna opened the main town's gate. After spending the night in an inn, they've spent the entire day fulfilling quests. Koharu's group didn't get to the fifth floor until close to sunset, so she did not notice the floor was unnaturally dark. Not the sunlight that shines through the apertures of Aincrad broke the veil, and now that it's evening, the light of the moon provides little relief from the darkness. Kirito would be nearly indetectable to her if it weren't for the campfire.

And, whether a blessing or a curse, the fifth floor presented the same as it did in the beta, so Jaymes' warning about the potential of player-killers could become true. Kirito's Search skill may warn them of any danger, whether man or monster, but Jaymes trusts his instinct. After all, his one goal is the survival of Koharu, even if it comes at his own expense. She proved yesterday in a duel with Jaymes that she's still not ready to fight other players despite holding her own against the Forest Elves. But while Koharu at least dueled her partner to completion, Asuna backed out of hers against Kirito moments ago. If that were Koharu, Jaymes wouldn't be so forgiving...and he wasn't at all.

"Koharu," Kirito calls, holding two cups in his hands. It's filled with a fruity-smelling tea Asuna bought in Rovia. He gestures toward the silent guardian, asking Koharu to serve and talk to him. She nods and stands up, taking the two cups with her as she steps over to Jaymes. Whether he knew it was her, he opened his eyes calmly. Deciding to be upbeat, she presents her best smile and holds the cup in her left hand to him.

"Here. Kirito made tea."

"Thank you." He accepts and takes the cup to his lips. He grimaces at the heat after taking a sip, drawing a laugh from Koharu. He looks back at her with a raised eyebrow. "What's funny?"

She avoids the subject as she leans against the wall with him, gazing up at the dark, starless sky. "This is different than every other floor we've been to. And only because it's so dimly lit. It's like a ghost town... It's kind of sad."

"Well, that is the theme of the floor—an ancient, rotting ruin of a weapons facility and a labyrinth. The whole floor is practically a dungeon. Though I still haven't understood why it has to be dark during the day and annoyingly dark at night. If any floor so far needed a change, this is the one."

"You think if we find Akihiko Kayaba, we can ask him to brighten the place?"

Jaymes scoffs into his cup, coughing hard as he removes it from his mouth. "Wh-What? You think Kayaba is here?"

Koharu nods. "It wouldn't be weird, would it?"

"What anime cliche are you expecting? The antagonist to be hidden among us?"

"It's a better cliche than for him to be waiting for us on the hundredth floor. Mhm. You can't argue with that." Convicted of her answer, Koharu stares at her partner, who bears a face of resignation. She takes a victorious sip of her tea, then stares down at the brownish liquid while swirling it. "Hey... What else is special about this floor?"

"Besides it being a dark ruin where PKers can take advantage of us again? And another branch of the Elf War campaign? Hmm..." Jaymes closes his eyes again, thinking hard in silence. Compared to Mito and Kirito, she knows that Jaymes doesn't have as much knowledge, for he played at his pace rather than at the forefront of the beta. Granted, he still made it to the ninth floor, eight floors higher than her, and he has years of gaming experience. So he must know something.

"...Oh, there was a special LA for beating the labyrinth boss. It was the Guild Flag, if I remember correctly. It provides bonuses to people within a guild. Nothing we need to worry about, though. Leave it to ALS or DKB to figure that out." Jaymes lowers the teacup from his lips, emptying it in one large gulp, then sets the cup on the ground. Remaining seated, he stares at the fire a couple of feet away, surrounded by Kirito and the other girls. "Our greatest danger is other players."

Koharu slides down the wall to sit down, bringing her knees to her chest. "Do... Do you believe other players will intentionally confront us?"

"...There's normally no issue with that. Players killing each other is part of playing a game. Sure, some are more honorable about it, which is why the duel system exists, but for others, attacking out in the open is preferable. The latter group gets a bad rep. In the beta, there was a system to indicate whether someone is a player killer." Jaymes points up above his head, towards the green diamond. "Green is normal, but if someone attacks without initiating a duel, their indicator turns orange. Only for the attacker, the defender isn't penalized."

"What does that mean?"

"It lets others know that this player attacked another and invokes a reputation system in towns. NPCs will be wary of the player. They might not be able to exchange at shops, or be hassled by guards. But there are ways to rid oneself of the orange indicator, or else it'll be too hard for the player to continue in the game. The more offenses you have, the greater the number of reputation quests are. At the same time, there are other ways to attack and kill another player."

Koharu knows one of the ways. She was there when Kirito was challenged to a half-finish duel by a guy named Morte two floors ago. Secretly a member of both ALS and DKB, Morte sought to take Kirito and maybe Koharu's lives. "Like the duel system?"

"That's one. A goal of the duels is to either defeat your opponent completely, beat them to half-health, or first-strike as we do. If you killed someone in a duel, it isn't counted as a penalty, so your indicator stays green."

"I see. That's why Morte chose that method."

"Mhm. But there is another way. Do you remember how we fought an endless number of wolves? Imagine if someone intentionally started that train to kill us. Monster PKing is another loophole because, technically, you didn't kill another player but set off the trigger for monsters to overwhelm them."

Jaymes looks at his lap and forms tight fists. "I promised to protect you to the end of this game, but even I have my limits. That is why...I cannot ask you to take another's life, but you must be prepared to preserve your own. You and Asuna have to do it. I don't want it, but there will come a day when I won't be able to protect you. There will come a day when I may need to be protected. So you got to learn how to fight for yourself."

Koharu nods her head, understanding what's being asked of her. "I promise."

"Thank you... To answer your question, I believe some players will take advantage of it. Already we've seen a couple of ways players will try having others kill. Morte orchestrated the ALS and DKB meeting at the elf camp, the duel with Kirito... Oh, right. Nezha's scam was, in a way, a form of player-killing, though it seems it didn't come to it. Though someone did accuse him of such."

Naturally, it seems implausible that Morte would direct the two guilds into fighting one another, that Nezha would weaken the top players by stealing their weapons, or that some who make a false accusation that another player died because of Nezha. If Koharu remembers, the guy who framed Nezha for murder was the same voice who called Kirito a Beater and instigated events when DKB and ALS met up as Morte planned. Nezha's motives aside, what would they gain by impeding the progress they've made up until that point? Why would anyone intentionally interfere with the goal of the front line?

"You think Morte and that guy... Joe, are working together?"

"Possibly. But for what reason, I have no clue. SAO is not a game, so why..."

As if Kirito heard my conversation with Koharu, or his with Mito and Asuna just happened to align with ours, he says, "Maybe…Morte isn't the same kind of player as us, in the truest sense."

"Huh? What do you mean?" Asuna questions.

"If you assume that his motive in interfering with our forward progress itself is an act of sabotage directed by whoever's running this game of death…it does make a kind of sense."

"S…sabotage? You're saying…he's working with Akihiko Kayaba?"

"Yeah." Kirito turns to the fire, shaking his head almost as quickly as he confirms Asuna's statement. "But even still, it doesn't add up. It would be one thing if we were just about to finish the game, but this guy started his activities when we were on the third floor out of a hundred. It's just too early. No, wait..."

"Now!" Mito's shout follows Kirito draws his sword and thrusts it into the campfire. When he pulls back, a crispy, elongated object with steam emitted from it is at the tip of the Elven Stout Sword. A baked yam.

"…Um…Kirito."

"Yep."

"When you were staring intently into the fire like that…"

"Yep."

"…Was it just to monitor how well the yam was cooking?"

"You bet." Kirito places his sword in its sheath, juggles the yam for a moment, then breaks it in two, one half larger than the other. The smaller piece is thrown to Jaymes, who catches and inspects the yam. Koharu smells a sweet scent as her partner breaks the yam in two.

"Here you go."

"Thank you." They eat the yam in silence together, listening to Kirito and Asuna discuss the origins of the yams (in which Koharu gagged, to her partner's amusement) from the humanoid fish monsters in the previous labyrinth. Kirito pinpointed the real-world counterpart to Central and South America, and Jaymes grunted in agreement. Kirito connected the monsters to Aztec legends, in which the world had ended four times. Civilization was eaten by jaguars and turned into monkeys, birds, and fish in each doomsday. Kirito admitted he came from a place famous for sweet potatoes.

Since the speech of yams being from Latin America and the Aztec talk was the only time Jaymes made nonverbal communication, Koharu assumes he knows about this too. Curious, she finishes the yam and sparks the question she's been curious about since they left the fourth-floor labyrinth: his personal life. "Jaymes... You know about the yams and Aztecs how?"

"Well," he starts, "I am half-African American by blood and an American citizen by birth. Up until earlier this year, I lived there."

"Oh. That makes sense then."

"Yeah. You don't see someone looking like me or Agil who's purely Japanese, huh?" He shrugs and looks at the group at the fire. "In any case, back to the other subject. Kayaba would unlikely impede us, given he instructed us to beat the game. If Morte and...someone else I think might be affliated with him are working together, there's someone else too."

Kirito nods, his eyes sharply focused on the campfire. "We've already heard a similar story."

"From Nezha," Koharu reiterates from her prior conversation.

"The man who spoke to them in the bar and taught them the trick to that scam for free—the one in the black poncho, I think his true goal was for Nezha to be judged by the rest of the top players. If it weren't for the rest of the Braves getting down on hands and knees to beg forgiveness after the second-floor boss fight, they might have executed Nezha. In a way, that would be PK-ing. Carefully toying with the thoughts of various players, guiding them into ultimately killing each other…You might call it a provocation PK."

Provocation PK. It doesn't sound as easy to pull off as Kirito says. It requires warping people's minds to the thought that someone has to die. In Jaymes' initial explanation of PKing, in a normal game scenario, it might be seen as a mere annoyance to harassment, depending on the circumstance. At its core (and minus the killing component), PKing is not much different from bullying in schools. But targeting a player with monsters or in a duel comes with a different risk than provocating. It is the same as directly bullying someone versus doing it via LINE, social media, and rumors. To the initiator, the former methods of PKing and bullying come with the risk they're harmed as well; monsters could turn on them, the defender of a duel could win, and public bullying will get the bully caught. But the provocating methods of PKing and bullying keep the responsible party hidden.

But in SAO, it isn't that simple. Killing someone is literal here, so to convince another to attack and kill requires an extraordinary amount of charisma. It was Joe who tried convincing Kibaou and Lind that Nezha should be punished, and to an extent, Koharu did agree that Nezha should pay for what he did, but not with his life. Had not the Legend Braves surrendered themselves to Lind's mercy too, would Lind have held off the blade?

"Do you suppose Morte and the black poncho could be the same person?"

"Unlikely," Mito says, using her new scythe to hoist herself to her feet. "The problem with this Morte being the same as the black poncho is that even I heard the rumors of the black poncho and Nezha's scam. Not much to add, but that was during our time on the second floor. You say Morte is two-timing the big guilds, right? That doesn't sound like the poncho person. And if I'm right, the situation is dire."

"What do you mean...by 'dire?'"

"If they're separate people, we should assume Morte and the black poncho are working together."

"And I think there's another with them. Maybe more." Jaymes narrows his eyes as he stands up, focusing on the deep black sky. "Morte, the poncho, and whoever's else with them... They're not concerned with whether we live or not."

"But if you kill players in SAO right now, they can't be revived…They'll die in the real world. Do Morte and his friend not want us to beat the game? Don't they want to get out of this place?" Asuna's voice was dry when she spoke, and her question went verbally unanswered by Koharu's partner. He just looks at her with the answer communicated between them. Even Koharu sees it.

Then Kirito breaks the silence with a raspy voice of his own. "Maybe…they're not concerned with whether we escape at all… Like you said, when your HP goes down to zero, the player dies. So maybe they just want to cause PKs…to commit murder…"

It might be a bit of favoritism, but as far as the writing of the fifth floor is concerned, there will be a lot of Koharu and Asuna perspectives. The next one's Jaymes, then there'll be a recycling turn of Asuna and Koharu POVs as the story shifts between Progressive Volume 4 and Integral Factor's events. Some parts of the game will win over the volume, and there'll also be a lot of Jaymes/Koharu and Kirito/Asuna/Mito grouping.